podcasts, politics and philosophy

Tag Archives: facebook

Last week I attended the Brisbane Evernote User Group (BEUG for short) and we were very fortunate to have Troy Malone from Evernote HQ (General Manager, Asia Pacific) join us over Skype for a chat about he uses their product in his daily life. How cool is that? It was pretty late his time too (midnight I think), so you have to hand it to Evernoters for evganelising.

I asked Troy what tool he recommends for clipping content from iOS apps into Evernote and he introduced me to the Lightly app made by Ignition Soft, the same company that makes Everclip, one of my other favourite iOS apps. So that was a win. (FWIW – Lightly is great for copying certain lines of text from a page you’re reading on your browser into Evernote, but I prefer Everclip for copying content out of other apps, like iBooks, etc).

Afterwards, Troy said the only thing he hasn’t figured out yet is how to get Facebook posts into Evernote. I said “I can do that!”

It wasn’t easy, but I nutted it out a few weeks ago when my wife, Chrissy, announced she was pregnant on Facebook. I thought it would be nice to save that for the baby book – and of course, the natural place for it is in Evernote.

So if anyone else is trying to work out how to clip a Facebook post (and its comments) into Evernote, here’s how I do it.

How To Clip A Facebook Post Into Evernote

STEP 1.

Open up the post you want to save. Facebook will open it in “Theater mode” – which is nice to look at, but annoying to try to clip into Evernote. Select the URL in the address bar and copy it.

Step 2.

Post that bad boy into a new tab. The resulting page should look like this:

Good ol’ Clive Palmer, who often sounds like he’s batshit crazy, actually made some sensible comments about Australia’s asylum seeker policy (another reason I’m embarrassed to be an Aussie these days).

Mining magnate Clive Palmer says the Federal Government should allow asylum seekers to fly to Australia to have their claims processed.

A political stalemate has gripped federal politics since two asylum seeker boats capsized, killing almost 100 people.

Mr Palmer does not support offshore processing, and says the current system puts asylum seekers in a difficult position.

He says even though many asylum seekers can afford plane fares, they are not allowed to fly so they turn to the riskier alternative of trying to reach Australia by boat.

“People who are in Indonesia and want to come to Australia cannot buy an airline ticket because the Australian Government stops them,” he told the ABC after the Liberal Party’s national conference.

“All that needs to happen is that the Government needs to stop telling airlines and other people not to give people safe transport.

“If they come down here and if they’re refugees, that’s one thing. If they haven’t got a legitimate claim, they can go right back on the plane the next day.”

I don’t know who created this graphic, but it’s been doing the rounds on Facebook and it’s pretty damning.

The bottom line as far as I’m concerned is that we have a responsibility to accept genuine refugees, to make their travel to Australia fast and safe, and to process their claims for asylum quickly and efficiently once they are here.

For frak’s sake, people – we are one of the wealthiest countries per capita on the entire planet with the lowest population density to boot. What is WRONG with us? Why are we so mean and churlish? Why are we so selfish and scared?

I seriously think we, as a nation, are suffering from some kind of clinical depression. We have everything going for us and yet we seem to have lost our basic human decency. It’s just not acceptable.

It’s obviously written by a sub-editor to a) be sensationalist and b) discredit science in the minds of the general public. I’ve already seen people in Facebook picking up the story and using it to start discussions about how science is equal to faith.

Very similar to the HeraldSun’s approach to the now-discredited neutrino experiments out of CERN last year.

Sensationalist and anti-science. Of course, any intelligent person understands that the scientific method is a process of refinement – one experiment or, in Penrose’s case, theory, in no way “upends” or “busts” anything, especially not time-tested theories such as the Big Bang or the speed of light being the speed limit for relativity.

But I’m pretty sure News Corp cares not about such things as accuracy. It’s about sensationalist yellow journalism and trying to discredit science. Why would they want to discredit science? Because it helps them rally the Christian Right vote. Fox News has turned itself into a profitable political power house in the USA by pandering to the Christian Right, anti-science demographic and it looks like News International wants to try the same trick here in Oz.

I first met Kieran Salsone a few years ago at a BTUB not long after I moved to Brisbane. I’d already known him via his Twitter handle websinthe. I knew from the comic he used to write that he had a sharp political mind. But it wasn’t until I caught up with him for a cigar a few months ago that I discovered that he also lead a polyamorous love life. As he, his fiancé Naomi and his girlfriend Rachelle all came out on Facebook this week, I thought it would be a great time to get him onto the show for a chat about polyamory. Has marriage had its day?

This morning I ran a quick experiment. I searched through News.com.au’s site for stories that mention Facebook in the title to see what percentage of those stories had a negative slant. My theory is that large media companies such as News are scared about the amount of traffic Facebook is getting, as it’s decreasing their own readership thereby affecting the revenue they can generate from advertising. So they are running Facebook scare campaigns.

News Corp, of course, has even more reason that other media companies to be hatin’ on the Facebook, because they own MySpace, Facebook’s biggest competitor.

Rangan Srikhanta is the Executive Director, One Laptop per Child Australia. On this show he chats with me about their efforts to get laptops into the hands of kids living in remote regions of Australia. The idea to speak with OLPC came out of a recent Geeks Who Care meeting we had in Brisbane. OLPC have a terrific program running called the “Window of Opportunity Initiative” which enables all of us to contribute to getting these wonderful devices out where they are needed.

On holidays in Melbourne, having an awesome time showing @fddlgrl all of my favourite haunts. Just have one quick thought to share with you.

We need to stop referring to the “Clinton” administration, the “Bush” administration and the “Obama” administration. We need to start referring to the last 16 years collectively as the “Goldman Sachs” administration.

I was prompted to think of this while reading this post on Crooks and Liars about the TARP bailout. The suggestion is that the bailout isn’t Obama’s fault, because Bush was still in power when it happened. They seem to be forgetting that the US Senate said NO to the original bailout vote, and it wasn’t until Obama took time out of his election campaign to “work Capitol Hill” that the bailout finally passed. I remember him getting the credit for it at the time. So he doesn’t get a pass on that shit.

The point, though, is that the US Treasury, under Clinton, Bush and Obama, has continued to be run by ex-Goldman Sachs executives. So let’s not fool ourselves about who is in power. Goldman were the single largest private investor in Obama’s election campaign. And now they are they have managed to wipe out their competition. As they say here, “Like on the TV program SURVIVOR – the last survivor standing is Goldman Sachs – who receives the grand prize. But in this case it is not just the fame and one million dollar prize. It is infamy with trillions of dollars in rewards.”

The banksters seem to be running things, at least in the USA. A friend of mine who works in finance told me recently how the big four banks in Australia have emerged from the GFC even more arrogant than ever. They managed to buy out most of their competition and now they have an even stronger lock on the marketplace, deciding who gets finance and at what usurious rates. Which is just another reason for all of your to join me on the “Million Bank March” campaign. It’s the only way I can see that we can start to reign them in.

I’m having another attempt this year to promote my alternative celebration on December 25 “Anaxagoras Day”.

Anaxagoras was the first recorded atheist; has been described as the first scientist; and was the first philosopher to take up at his abode at Athens. He was the father of the idea of atoms and the teacher of Pericles. Around 450BCE he wrote his treatise “On Nature” which declared (among other things but we don’t know much of it, as it’s been lost to history) that the sun was a red-hot stone (an idea borrowed from the ideas of Anaximenes) and that the moon was made of earth and derives it’s light from the sun. He was accused of being an atheist, sentenced to death, but seems to have escaped (probably with the help of Pericles) and was exiled from Athens.

According to Britannica: “About 480 Anaxagoras moved to Athens, then becoming the centre of Greek culture, and brought from Ionia the new practice of philosophy and the spirit of scientific inquiry. After 30 years’ residence in Athens, he was prosecuted on a charge of impiety for asserting that the Sun is an incandescent stone somewhat larger than the region of the Peloponnese.”

If you want to join us in celebrating the life of Anaxagoras, just join the Facebook group. I just see it as a day to celebrate the fact that we CAN be atheists without fear of persecution. It’s a great day to think up a way to spread a little bit of rational thinking.

I just watched this recent TED video of religious historian and author Karen Armstrong talking about the importance of the Golden Rule and how we need to re-engineer a world based on compassion. It’s excellent and I highly recommend it.

Speaking of compassion, I’m re-launching my charity “Geeks Who Care” in Brisbane this month and I’m hoping some people will join us for the first Brisbane catch-up. The idea of GWC (which I tried to get off the ground just before I left Melbourne in 2008) is that geeks have a special skill-set that I think can be used to improve people’s lives in ways that mere mortals cannot. We know how to make the interwebs work, how to promote things via social networking, how to build websites, make podcasts, refurb PCs, build mesh networks, etc. I want to see geeks doing more when they get together than just nerding out about new tech. We need to be giving back to the society that let’s us be geeks in the first place. So, anyway, details of the Brisbane meeting are here (yes it’s a Facebook page) and if anyone wants to gets stuff started in other cities, go for your life. Let’s share idea and learnings as we go.